Couri­er com­pa­ny Aero­post main­tains that the new­ly-im­ple­ment­ed sev­en per cent on­line pur­chase tax (OPT) is un­fair as it adds an­oth­er lay­er of costs to the on­line shop­ping com­mu­ni­ty.

At a press con­fer­ence host­ed at the com­pa­ny's head of­fice at Fer­nan­dez In­dus­tri­al Cen­tre, Laven­tille, yes­ter­day, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Gillian Ro­driguez-Clark said the com­pa­ny, while main­tain­ing its le­gal oblig­a­tion to com­ply with the tax, is not in favour of it.

"Our po­si­tion on this tax is clear. We are not in sup­port of it as we do not be­lieve it has been fair­ly ap­plied across all modes of ship­ping of on­line pur­chas­es. Like many oth­er com­pa­nies in our in­dus­try we have con­cerns about the me­chan­ics of the tax which is un­fair­ly tar­get­ed at just those of us bring­ing e-com­merce by air. The tax al­so makes items more ex­pen­sive for gen­er­al con­sumers," she said.

Ro­driguez-Clark said be­cause of the com­pa­ny's more than three decades in the ship­ping and lo­gis­tics busi­ness and its record of work­ing close­ly with the US Gov­ern­ment Cus­toms and Bor­der Pro­tec­tion Agency in Flori­da, Aero­post has been able to se­cure a tax ex­emp­tion al­low­ing its cus­tomers to save the US dol­lar tax­es they would have in­curred on their on­line shop­ping pur­chas­es.

"All US re­tail­ers are in­clud­ed, es­pe­cial­ly Tri­ni favourites such as Ama­zon, eBay, Wal­mart, For­ev­er 21, Gap and Old Navy, to name a few. What this means to our cus­tomers is that they save what they would have to pay on US tax­es there­by ful­ly dis­count­ing the im­pact of the sev­en per cent OPT," she said.

Ro­driguez-Clark said the ex­emp­tion is ex­clu­sive to aero­post.com based on their com­mer­cial agree­ment with the state of Flori­da.

About the OPT?

In his bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion on Sep­tem­ber 30, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert in­tro­duced the OPT to be levied on goods bought on­line and shipped in­to the coun­try via air freight.

The OPT, set at sev­en per cent, went in­to ef­fect on Oc­to­ber 20 and is based on the cost in­sur­ance and freight (CIF) val­ue of the im­port­ed goods.

Since its im­ple­men­ta­tion couri­er com­pa­nies have been lob­by­ing to have the tax re­pealed claim­ing it un­fair­ly tar­gets com­pa­nies bring­ing in goods by air.

Im­bert re­cent­ly re­vealed that Gov­ern­ment col­lect­ed ap­prox­i­mate­ly $1 mil­lion in the first ten days of the OPT.?

An­dre Wor­rell